Meeting place for kin of John and Lovenia Gray

Unfortunately this story is not from any of my known gene pool but I always leave hope for stuff like this to appear. Ran into this article and was just splitting a gutt….now this little tidbit is just delightful, and if I had any Alexanders or Tompkins I’d be looking under any rock for kin!

Although my heart wanted to get back to more regular posting, things just kept happening. Still trying to get back our website domains and have an isp that works, but I’m giving up. So, I thought about it and realized I needed some focus to my genealogy today.

My third great grandparents on both sides of my family are my stumbling blocks. I’ve found that searching for a John Gray is pretty much as bad as looking for John Smith….sigh…and as one famous Gray researcher put it “Grays pretty much propogate like barnyard cats”. Indeed. To top it off I have no idea what the REAL name for his bride is. In census work she is Devina, Lavina, Loubenia, get the idea? And there was never a connection to her maiden surname. According to the census materials again, John Gray was born in 1799 and his lovely bride about 1806. The other important facts that I know are they were into farming, helped raise grandchildren, they lost two sons in the civil war and they were buried in Bold Springs Cemetery in Cairo, Georgia. According to census evidence they both were also born in Georgia….where is speculative of course. John died in 1881 and Devina in 1898 according to a gedcom, but I have no death certificates or evidence other than their burial information which was obtained the same way. It appears they had 7 children, J Mench, William, Sarah, John, Martha, Amanda and Susan with the two eldest having been killed in separate battles of the civil war. Of course that leaves the only brother to research being another John….swell…LOL!

Love to hear from collateral kin who may have evidence and/or family stories to corroborate or squash current info.

Cathy from Genealogy – Digging up Dirt honored me with the “I Heart Your Blog” award. How special I feel now;O) Just wished my internet service had allowed me to respond quicker. Ah such is life in cyber-space though.

The rules associated with this particular tagging are that the tagged blogger

can put the logo on his/her blog

must link to the person who gave the award

must nominate seven other blogs and link to them

must leave a comment on each of the nominated blogs

So I suppose the start would be from my blogroll, but several have already received this, so I’ll try with some different ones – even a non-genealogy one;O)

I’m being held hostage by my ISP/phone/cable company, so I am unable to keep this up until they start playing nice. Mediacom has thus far avoided BBB, and weekly requests (since November) to fix the problems and now they are worse…no one can call in and internet is very intermittent. The biggest pain is I’m paying for this….ay yi yi. Anyway, didn’t want to give the impression that I’d vanished, I’ve actually got lots of stuff to share. Hope to real soon.

I have been scanning my father-in-laws photos so the entire family can share them. I never really thought of it as possibly preserving memories, but this article by Eastman’s post today made me realize I may actually be doing the right thing, of course by accident, but hey! Thankfully, Amy did that for my father’s stuff after he passed away, so guess I’ll have to continue with the other side after I finish that batch. After thinking about it a bit further, figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to digitize all those birth certificates, etc., I’ve got hanging around. Now if I could just find a definitive answer on how to file and retrieve them all….hmmmmm.

Thomas Edward “Eddie” Belser passed away on the 3rd of August after a lengthy illness. I’m really sad about it today. I didn’t get to meet Eddie a couple years ago because I wasn’t able to get to the Gray reunion, and now I won’t ever get that chance….sigh. Eddie is my second cousin and was 4 months younger than I am. He is also a great-grandchild of Jim and Annie Gray of Pensacola, but his close relations are in Jacksonville. I hope to be able to meet his closer kin someday soon….well, not in hurricane season though!

Sorry for the lack of updates, but the computer decided it needed to be reformatted, then again, and I’m just not getting done very quickly. I should be up and finished with that stuff in a couple more days and hopefully back to updating the blog soon.

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